[SAC] New Hardware, can we purchase now

[Alex M]

On 03/02/2018 12:25 PM, Regina Obe wrote:
> I'm in IRC meeting with Chris and he recalls the only outstanding thing
> before hardware purchase was the disk size
> 
> [15:17] <TemptorSent> From my reply to the mailing list a while back, the
> pricing for larger drives: (+$212 for 4x10he or +$540 for 4x12he)
>  [15:19] <TemptorSent> That gives us practical double-redundant storage of
> 12-16TB and 16-20TB respectively, depending how we use it.
> 
> 
> If that is all, can we just get the bigger disk and move forward with the
> hardware purchase.  Unless of course the purchase has already been made.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Regina
> 

Apologies, I dropped the ball on many things while traveling for work...

My take on this, I was unclear on if we really understood how we would
utilize the hardware for the needs, since there are a few new
technologies in discussion we haven't used before. Was also in favor of
small savings as we're over the line item, and that money could be used
for things like people hours or 3rd party hosting, spare parts, etc...

So a few questions:
1. If we get the optane card, do we really need the SSDs? What would we
put on the SSDs that would benefit from it, considering the Optane card?
2. What caching tool will we use with the Optane? Something like
fscache/CacheFS that just does everything accessed, or something
configured per site like varnish/memcache etc?
3. Our storage growth is modest, not that I don't consider the quoted 8
or 10 TB to be reliable, but the 2 and 4 TB models have a lot more
reliability data, and take significantly less time to rebuild in a Raid
configuration. So how much storage do we really need for Downloads and
Foss4g archives?
4. Do we know what we plan to put on the SSD drives vs the Spinning Disks?

I think with the answers to these we'll be able to vote this week and order.

Thanks,
Alex